15-JUL-2010
Waiting her turn, Third Avenue, New York City, New York, 2010
Rush hour taxis are not easily found in New York City. You have to know where exactly where to position yourself to grab one before someone else beats you to it. It’s a matter of experience and assertiveness. In this case, I noticed two women were going for the same cab making its way up Third Avenue. One of them, in silhouette, had the nerve to dart off the sidewalk in the middle of the block to nab this cab, while the woman in the foreground was still patiently waiting for it at the intersection. Meanwhile, the Third Avenue bus reaches the intersection at the same time. The loser of this context boarded it and due to the heavy traffic, probably reached her destination along the avenue at the same time that cab would have arrived there.
17-JUL-2010
Summer walk, Park Avenue, New York City, New York, 2010
Four friends walk side by side up Park Avenue, three of them clutching summery drinks in their hands. Another woman keeps pace with them, but her posture tells us that she is not part of this group. I saw them coming from several blocks away. I waited until they simultaneously reached a shaft of light on the pavement and made this image. The noon sun illuminates their shoulders as they match each other, stride for stride, and to a degree, sip for sip.
09-JUL-2010
The city that never sleeps, New York City, New York, 2010
At night, New York City becomes a study in lights. I made this wide-angle image from my window as rain clouds, tinged with orange, rolled over the illuminated skyline of midtown Manhattan. The Chrysler Building’s fiery crown may be the focal point of this image, but the glowing window at the bottom right was just as important to me. It is a rear window of a brownstone apartment building only a few yards away from my vantage point, the only window illuminated in its area. It offers a contrasting lone counter point to the massed array of lights in the skyscrapers beyond, a reminder that New York is a city that never seems to sleep.
16-SEP-2009
Banner, Park Avenue, New York City, New York, 2009
The subject is a simple one – a lamppost banner heralding an exhibition of watercolors, prints, and illuminated books of poetry by the visionary William Blake at New York’s Morgan Library and Museum. I wanted to photograph the banner as if it was the embodiment of Blake and his art – ethereal and often mysterious.
I placed the banner behind a layer of branches, allowing the blue field and part of the sensuous figure to peek through. I oversaturated and underexposed my image in the post processing, creating my own tribute to this amazing talent.
18-SEP-2009
Echoes of Strand, New York City, New York, 2009
One of my favorite pictures of New York City is Paul Strand’s “Wall Street, 1915:”
In his Wall Street image, Strand juxtaposes abstracted figures of commuting workers plodding past the House of Morgan on Wall Street. They plod past the bank as robots; dwarfed in scale, and dehumanized by the very institutions they serve. In my own image, I echo the point Strand makes here about New York City. In Strand’s day, laborers were little more than subservient chattel. In our day, workers and institutions alike are decimated by financial greed. In my image, the commuting workers are larger than Strands, but similarly abstracted by the light. Instead of a bank, they plod past a sleek store window filled with robotic mannequins wearing clothes that few of them can afford. They plod along the sidewalk, some with heads bowed, just as the workers back in 1915 plodded below the black windows of the Morgan Bank. New York City is a city of great vitality. But it is also a city built on the backs of its workers, and as the 21st century dawns, those workers are feeling the pressure.
17-SEP-2009
Crossing 34th Street, New York City, New York, 2009
Much of this image is filled with the flow of the heavy traffic and massive buildings that line 34th Street, one of the busiest streets in the world. I use a long telephoto lens (400mm) to compress both the traffic and the buildings to make them seem to be even closer together. I remove the sky altogether – there is no space for the natural world in this image. As I was shooting, a woman in a long ponytail and high heels came striding across the intersection. She may seem visually overwhelmed by it all, yet she pays no heed to anything but her mission at the moment – to get across the street before the light changes. She is the only person visible in a scene where thousands work and ride unseen. Yet she almost blends in -- a metaphor for every anonymous individual caught in the swirl of urban life.
18-SEP-2009
Lost tourists, New York City, New York, 2009
It is easy to find people adrift on the streets of this city. Although the streets and avenues are numbered, such streets can confuse anyone from out of town as Broadway, which slices diagonally across the heart of the city. I found this pair of tourists standing in front of a souvenir shop on Broadway, studying their map of Manhattan with great concern. Even more important is the third party here – it seems that the Statue of Liberty is looking over their shoulder. She offers no help. This is one of those images that can only be made in the heart of Manhattan.
18-SEP-2009
A last pull, New York City, New York, 2009
The entrances to New York City’ office buildings are usually crowded with smokers taking a last pull on a cigarette before going back to work. I abstract this smoker down to just the front half of his head, an arm, and a creased hand grasping the filter between the thumb and forefinger. We are left with a flash of cuff, one closed eye and a lifetime of smoking, all of it squeezed between unyielding pillars of marble.
17-SEP-2009
Park Avenue at night, New York City, New York, 2009
I stood on a traffic island in the middle of Park Avenue for a half hour, waiting to juxtapose the silhouettes of people crossing the street against the flow of nighttime traffic. The quality of light was different on each side of the street – the traffic heading away from me was a mass of red taillights pm a dark street, while the oncoming traffic created a golden glow on the pavement. Given such a contrast in exposure, I had only one place for silhouetted pedestrians – the oncoming traffic side. I used a shutter speed of 1/15th of a second, fast enough to freeze the cars both coming and going, but slow enough to blur the silhouetted pedestrians who eventually walked into my frame. They seem so vulnerable out there in that sea of traffic, at least from my vantage point. And that is the point I was trying to make with this image.
18-SEP-2009
Curtain of glass, Park Avenue, New York City, New York, 2009
The reflections on the windows of the office structures surrounding Grand Central Terminal create a curtain of glass that looks like a soft summer rain. I cropped in on them to remove all evidence of sky in the reflections, which would have destroyed the illusion. There are four buildings involved in this image – the host building’s windows covers the entire frame, while three other buildings flow through it at left, center, and right. Each reflected building offers a different pattern and color, yet all are unified by the texture created by the host building.
28-JUL-2009
Brownstone, New York City, New York, 2009
Dappled morning light warms the façade of this 19th century brownstone in Manhattan’s Murray Hill neighborhood. The oval windows give it a pair of eyes to look back at us, while the center window is transformed by shadows into an echo of religious faith.
29-JUL-2009
Morning on Park Avenue, New York City, New York, 2009
A cross section of New Yorkers pass below the awnings of Park Avenue’s elegant apartment buildings on their way to work. They walk in both directions, passing each other without acknowledgement – an expression of urban anonymity